Chinese Martial Arts Ground Fighting

PHK philosophy is simple: “Learn how to grapple, so you don’t have to.” You might be not interested in grappling, but grappling might be interested in you. You might end up in the clinch, and yes, you might end up on the ground. If you don’t have any clinching and grappling skills, you will.

As many of our colleagues have correctly pointed out, Chinese martial arts didn’t have any grappling in BJJ sense (position > submission), for obvious reasons of the difference between 1 on 1 sport fighting and reality based self-protection.

Concept of improving position or achieving control for submission in incremental steps that can be stabilised (In China it was more of an ‘all or nothing’ explosive attack every time)

Using ‘specific sparring’ as a way to drill the positions in an alive way to rapidly gain functional skill.

Excellent analysis.

The good news is that for a reality-based self-defense, you don’t need that much, but – you need to train ground fighting phase of the combat on regular basis.

And if you enjoy grappling, cross train – preferably in a MMA environment, not just pure grappling, which doesn’t take punches in account. That is what we do in PHK, following Bruce Lee’s wise words: ““Absorb what is useful [and necessary!], discard what is useless and add what is specifically your own”. PHK is the evolution of classical Hung Kyun – MMA for the street.

Remember: “Learn how to grapple, so you don’t have to.”

Pavel Macek Sifu, Practical Hung Kyun

Note: The drawing above comes from a book called “Fu Jian Shaolin Boxing” (Fuk Gin Siu Lam Kyun), published in 1983 (i.e. decade before the first UFC).

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